Top 10 Mac OS X Dashboard Widgets for 2013

4 February 201330,590 viewsOne Comment

The easiest and fastest way to add specific functionality to your Mac is via the humble and oft forgot OS X Dashboard Widget. From international headline cable news and converting color codes to weather and sport, have a good look at this top 10 Mac OS X Dashboard Widgets list with tips, reviews and a whole lot more.

• WeatherBug Local Weather (download, image below) — An oldie, but definitely still the best weather widget. You get the forecast, radar and even a local (where available) live weather cam, as well as plenty of links that deliver an enhanced look at your (US) weather.
— See also: WeatherOffice (Canada) via MacUpdate
— See also: Radar In Motion

• Sports Fan (download) — Are you a fan of baseball, basketball, football and/or hockey? This is the way to follow your fave teams and get all the stats.

• Sunlit Earth — The original Sunlit Earth Dashboard Widget is back! Created using Cocoa in Xcode, this version is completely Mac native and is designed to run on Mac OS X 10.6.8 or higher.

• iStat nano (UNAVAILABLE for download) — A system monitoring widget with a tiny footprint and a beautifully animated user interface.
— See also: AnalyticsWidget

• MiniTV (download) — Allows you to watch International TV News right from Mac OS X Dashboard. Available stations include BBC, CNN, Aljazeera, ABC News, MTV and more than a dozen more.
— TIP: If you have a second monitor, MiniTV will continue playing in fullscreen after you leave Dashboard, so you can keep working in your primary display, nice.

• Currency Converter (download) — Features include automatically updated exchange rates, support all the traded currencies of the world, support the old legacy european currencies (like italian lira, deutsch mark, french francs) and much, much more.
— See also: Color Converter

• Sudoku (download) — A logic-based, combinatorial number-placement puzzle, the objective of Sudoku is to fill a 9×9 grid with digits so that each column, each row, and each of the nine 3×3 sub-grids that compose the grid contains all of the digits from 1 to 9.
— See also: Snake (download) — Play snake and discover Whosegame, a site of independent video games.

• Facebook::Alert (download) — A new social networking widget that checks your facebook.com account for any new Messages or Pokes — scratch that itch!

I very much wanted to include an iTunes lyric Dashboard widget, but couldn’t find a fully functional one. My longtime favorite lyric widget, TunesText, is no longer being supported and, unfortunately, doesn’t function properly anymore, though it still displays lyrics I already have.

KeyCaps presented a virtual keyboard on the screen that was identical to the users physical keyboard.
The use would select a typeface such as Zapf Dingbats or Mathematical symbols and the virtual keys would change to reflect the new typeface. There was a single line where the user could type text as a test. The keyboard would change as the user pressed shift, option and option shift.

If anyone is interested in making this widget, I am interested in purchasing a copy.